The strongest ingredient remains the four reptiles' incorrigible charm, which easily outclasses a muddled storyline and concessions to the prepubescent male audience.
The plot's all over the place, but director Kevin Munroe keeps it at a hare's pace. The sharp graphics impress too. It's nothing to cow about, but it does, more or less, fill its shell.
Worst of all is the lack of genuine laughs. Writer-director Kevin Munroe has apparently forgotten that the Ninja Turtle phenomenon started as rib-nudging parody.
I guess if you read the comic strip and you played the video games and you watched the TV show and dug the earlier movies, you'll dig this new version. For me, I didn't do any of that stuff.
USA Today
March 23, 2007
It takes more than an awkward title attempting to sound cool to overcome its mundane plot and silly dialogue.
This mediocre computer-generated action flick is packed full of monsters and sword-fights, but the story-telling is about as deft as a turtle turned on its back, struggling to get up but going nowhere fast.
Almost every good scene in TMNT is an action sequence and a lot of time and thought has been put into them. So much in fact that none seems to have been spared for the story or any of the other characters.
...while the visuals are terrific, the plot is a distracting clunker that feels like it was written one line at a time by a bunch of overexcited fan-board commentators playing a round-robin storytelling game.
